Stinking Thinking

26042011

I’m awesome. I’m so awesome I sometimes amaze myself at the sheer awesomeness I possess.

Why the sudden dedication to my own personal deification (I’ve no idea if that’s a real word)? Well…

You may remember me talking about how there’s likely to be a personality part to bipolar, for one reason or another. My way of describing this was to picture two lines spaced apart being drawn along a really long sheet of paper, sometimes going up, sometimes going down. Now these lines represent the borders of bipolar moods and you can be anywhere inbetween them at any given point. What puts you where was your thoughts at the time, usually in advance.

So… why so important? Well, a lovely study by Manchester and Lancaster Universities says that it may be possible to predict mood swings based on how people feel about their mood swings. If this is true then it kinda validates my theory on how mood swings work etc etc. Ergo it’s me looking so awesome I could be the House M.D. of psychiatry (without the gammy leg n the penchant for Vicodin), although I’m probably more likely to be the Rain Man of Psychiatry.

Of course it could all be complete bollocks and the other school of thought that mood controls thought would win and I end up looking like the G W Bush of Psychiatry.

Now if you’ve happened to have time to read the article linked above then you’ll have seen a major line into CBT being suggested. There are those amongst us who don’t think CBT works (I’m currently imagining some saying a variant of ‘No shit Sherlock!’ right now). My personal feelings about CBT is that it’s current scope is very limited as it seems to be to do with behavioural problems rather than psychlogical. An example of this provided by someone else was;

“[insert name] pissed me off”“No they didn’t. They did something and you chose to be pissed off”

I then pointed out to person providing example that it was pretty much the definition of “someone pissing you off” so playing semantics really doesn’t help.

Perhaps my version of CBT would be better. If something is getting to you then Stop, Pause, and Analyse. By using this SPA technique you put the brakes on a situation and can then get a handle on things. It’s better to stop and get your bearings than run blindly into the trees (I so wanted to put that analogy in). So by visiting a SPA treatment you get a chance to relax and approach things anew.

Damn, sounds like I’m writing a self help book doesn’t it. Hmm, maybe I should delete this and actually write a self help book. It might help people and I might get rich!

Well, you’re still reading this so I’m not rich. Damn. Anyway, the whole point of this Stop, Pause, and Analyse thing (I have to capitalise it now) is that you are smart enough to know what’s right and wrong, what to do in most situations, there’s nothing CBT can realistically teach you really. You just need to give yourself a moment to stop the unthinking behaviour, and allow yourself to think about things a bit. Strictly speaking this isn’t CBT or its more evil cousin DBT, because you’re not thinking about situations you could be in etc. It can’t be conceptualised because you have to be in the situation and prompt yourself to do it. Hell, I don’t remember to do it often, it’s even taken someone prompting me to do it, but then it can make a hell of a difference when I do.

I guess like writing when I have repetitive thoughts to get the thoughts out of my head (it works for me, I don’t know why but it does), I’m giving my brain what it needs. Focus. I gotta be honest, if anybody reading this tries it out then I genunely would like to know the result. Does either writing to vent repetitive thoughts or the SPA technique (copyright NullFuture) help? Or are we all just looking for our own method?